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Comments, problems, suggestions about Oric emulators (Euphoric, Mess, Amoric, etc...) it's the right place to ask. And don't hesitate to give your tips and tricks that help using these emulations in the best possible way on your favorite operating system.

This is an example of what I always wanted in an emulator: remote debugging, so I can write a program which tells Oricutron to dump the memory from A to B continuously and the program could interpret the dump for me (decoding the data and telling the sate of threads, my memory block list, objects in memory and their status, whatever....)

Maybe it would make sense to have something like a GDB compatible layer, that would make it possible to attach to Oricutron as if it was a GDB instance, which means you could run and debug visually in things like Code::Blocks

Would be kind of more practical to have something that automatically saves a screenshot, with auto-numbering, maybe even using the name of the loaded tape or dsk as a base name, incrementing and saving each time you press a key

Second, a person I know is trying to use The Quill. We are not able to make it work from disk, and using it within Oricutron has problems when saving the game data. We have tried several options:

Simply select save and a filename (with .tap extension and without it), as requested by the program. No TAP file is generated.

Check if it was adding it to the quill.tap. I am not completely sure, but I think it does not try to add it even if the tap name is displayed on the status as if writing there. In any case, I cannot load it back.

As the program can search for data with a given name, I selected another tap then the quill.tap file again (is there an easy way to rewind?) and tried to LOAD it. It FOUND the program data chunks and nothing else. Besides the file was apparently not modified.

I found no way to create an empty file from the emulator's menu whatsoever.

Create a dummy tape with an empty program and CSAVE"", then selecting it in Oricutron before saving the game data. It did not work, even if the loading routine can search for a chunk with a given name, ignoring the rest.

Use the F9 option to start recording on a tape (ort), then save, then press F9 again. Some kind of dummy data appears on the file, but it seems to me that it is created when the ort image is created, but no actual data is stored. When trying to restore the data, I tried to select the ort file and all I got is a "Searching.." message.

So, basically I can't find a way to make Oricutron save the work on a new file so it can be loaded back. It may be that Quill is using some kind of ROM calls which are not trapped by the emulator, or use its own routines or that I am being dumb, but there is no obvious way to do something as simple as that.

From The Quill docs: "The Quill contains its own tape handler which allows files to be saved, verified or loaded at two different speeds on either the Oric-1 or the Atmos interchangably".
So yes it seems to be specific save/load routines!